Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/302

 290 yournal of American Folk-Lore.

upon her and volunteered to regain for Mrs. Smith the affections of a man in whom she was interested. She did not entertain the love-charmer's pro- posals, she said, though he told her he could get her swain back quicker and cheaper than any one else, and called often to repeat his offers. Fi- nally, Johnson is alleged to have told the woman that he had bought a vault from some New York people, in which to keep the names of people for whom he was working charms. Into this vault, he informed Mrs. Johnson, he had put her name, though without her consent. Johnson is said to have further advised Mrs. Smith that the placing of her name in this vault with a certain kind of gas was a secret process, and love-matches could be infallibly arranged by the juxtaposition of the names of the lovers in this vault, under the influence of the magic gas.

" This system does not appear to have accomplished the effects desired on Mrs. Smith's pocket-book, the woman surmising that, if the charm would work at all, the placing of her name and her friend in the vault would be sufficient without the transfer of any negotiable securities to Johnson. This impression Johnson is said to have speedily designed means to remove. Mrs. Smith says that when he had failed to collect for his unauthorized subjection of her name to the vault process, he changed his tactics and called on her one evening with a horrible story. A leak had been discovered in the precious vault, according to the necromancer, and the lovers whose names had been placed in it were dying off rapidly instead of finding mutual bliss. The gas was escaping faster than he could supply it, according to Johnson, and Mrs. Smith was in a fair way to escape to a better world with it. This change in the situation terrified the colored woman, and when Johnson let her understand that money was needed to buy the very expensive gas needed to keep the lovers alive, Mrs. Smith found the cash. News from the vault was a trifle more en- couraging for a while, but Johnson's troubles with the gas seemed to be unending, and soon he needed more coin to meet the drain of gas by the leak. Mrs. Smith again and again found comparatively large sums to pre- vent herself becoming a victim of the leaky meter. Once she had no money at hand, but Johnson called with such a tale of horror about what was happening to the other lovers in the vault, that she went out and borrowed sixty-five dollars, and fainted after handing it over to buy more gas. After this experience, Johnson told her that the outlook was a trifle better, and he had succeeded in getting her name out of the vault, but it was necessary to bury it to save her life. Mrs. Smith provided funds for the interment."

��NOTES AND QUERIES.

��Survival in New England of Foundation Sacrifice. — In 1824, or thereabouts, when some repairs or changes were making in my grand- father's, Thorndike Deland's, house at the corner of Essex and Newberry streets in Salem, a china image was placed, or replaced, in the brickwork.

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